FLICKR, ALLAN AJIFOExamining the brains of recently deceased patients who more than 30 years ago received injections of growth hormone derived from the pituitary glands of cadavers, researchers have found evidence that Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may be transmissible via extracts contaminated with amyloid-β. While none of the patients exhibited signs of dementia before their deaths, most had moderate to severe accumulation of amyloid-β in their brains. The results are published today (September 9) in Nature.
“It’s the first in-human indication of potential transmission of amyloid-β pathology,” said Claudio Soto of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston who was not involved in the study.
The results are “extremely provocative,” said neurologist and neuroscientist Costantino Iadecola, director of the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College who also was not involved in the study. “The implications . . . are really astounding. They range from the way we should behave in the operating room all the way to the basic mechanistic questions that are still unsolved in Alzheimer’s disease.”
Before a synthetic growth hormone was created in 1985, patients with growth deficiencies were often treated with growth hormone extracted from homogenized human pituitary glands ...
